I've changed my email address. How do I change my login? What if I change institutions?

In the navigation bar, you'll see a link titled Login/Account Info. If you've already logged in, this will take you to a list of MyData links. One of those is Edit Account Settings. Here you can change your password, email address, or any other information you have previously provided.

When I attempt to access data from home, I get an "access denied" message, even though my institution is an ICPSR member. Why?

Assuming your OR has provided us with the IP ranges for your institution, you can access data from home, but you first have to login to the ICPSR website from on campus. Once you do so, your MyData account is validated for off campus downloads for the next six months. Every time you log in to the ICPSR website from on campus, that is extended another six months.

In the event that you simply cannot get on campus (for example, you're on sabbatical), simply contact help@icpsr.umich.edu. We'll check with your institution's Official Representative and then manually validate your account.

Whenever I try to login, I get a message stating that I don't have cookies enabled. What's going on?

Under normal operation the website uses the HTTP protocol to deliver content. In a small number of cases we use HTTP with SSL encryption (commonly referred to as HTTPS) to protect the security of the data moving across the network. Our login procedure is one such case.

When one tries to access a resource on the website, the system checks for the presence of a login ticket (or, more generically, a cookie). If there is no ticket available, the browser is redirected to a URL (using HTTP) where the person enters a login and password. When the person clicks the Log In button, the login and password are delivered to the website via HTTPS, and the website returns a login ticket via HTTPS. Finally the website returns the person to the original Web page or resource via HTTP. If anything goes wrong during this process, we deliver an error message about cookies not being enabled, which is the most common cause of failure. The next most common failure is when a site uses a proxy server or firewall, but only proxies HTTP, not HTTPS, and so the transaction fails.

The work around is to force the entire transaction through HTTPS. Here's an easy way to do that:

Go to this page: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/mydata?path=ICPSR

This should redirect you to the error page about cookies not being enabled. The URL in the "Address bar" should look like this:

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ticketlogin.

Modify the URL above, adding in an "s" between the "p" in "http" and the semicolon. It should now look like this:

https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ticketlogin

Enter your MyData login and password, and click the Log In button.Or click the Log In Anonymously button.

You should now have this URL in your "Address bar"(http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/mydata?path=ICPSR) and have a list of account-related actions you can take. The important thing, though, is that you now have a ticket (cookie) and should be able to download resources. If you click the logo at the top of the page, that will return you to the home page, and you can then use the website as usual.

Please note that you cannot combine steps (1) and (3) by starting at a HTTPS-delivered version of the home page, because you will still be redirected to an HTTP-type link for the login page after performing step (2). Thus step (3) will still be necessary, and it will also force many web fetches to incur the SSL encryption overhead on both our server and your desktop machine.